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The Joyce Girl

TheJoyce Girl tells the fictionalised story of Lucia Joyce’s affair with a young Samuel Beckett and then a young Alexander Calder. The only daughter of Irish author, James Joyce, and Nora Barnacle, Lucia aspired to be a modern dancer. Talented and ambitious, she trained with many of the most famous dancers of her time. The novel switches between past and present as Lucia retells her story to pioneering psychoanalyst, Doctor Carl Jung, who she was sent to by her father to take the ‘talking cure.’

A story of thwarted ambition and the destructive love of a father, The Joyce Girl is a true story, but imagined where facts were unavailable.

Described by author, Emma Darwin, as “a gripping and little-known story at the heart of one of the twentieth century’s most astonishing creative moments…researched deeply and brought to richly-imagined life.”

The Joyce Girl was published by Impress in the UK (June 2016), after winning the Impress Prize for New Writing. It went to auction in Australia/New Zealand where it was published by Hachette in September 2016. In 2017 it was published by Aufbau Verlag in Germany, Galaxia Gutenberg in Spain and South America and Hep Kitap in Turkey. It has been bought by Centrepolygraph in Russia and by EMAS Publishing in Bulgaria. It was a Reader’s Pick 2016 in The Guardian and was longlisted for the 2017 Waverton Good Read Award. It was chosen from 130 books, as one of 11 to feature at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival.

You can hear me discussing James Joyce at http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/overnights/overnights—james-joyce/7798244